Always ethereal, always eclectic, I write as the mood strikes, when there intrigue reveals itself. Usually that means something controversial or adventure of some sort.

I've tried really hard to be unprovocative, but have as yet been unsuccessful.

Thursday, 16 February 2006

My Little Friends

In Biology, we began a long term experiment, watching the results of mini-ecosystems: one a terrestrial ecosystem with flowers and beans planted, and grasshoppers and roly-polys; the second aquatic with fish and snails and aquatic plants; the 3rd a mixture, with fish and snails and seeds and aquatic plants. So far the fish seem to be dying, though a couple remain in the aquatic one. The snails, except for one that escaped, remain. One cricket has grown mold on him, but to be fair, he was crippled to begin with. It's been about a week. We'll see how things progress on Monday. If we had all the organisms we needed for this, as we could get in America, there would be more give and take in the mini-food webs, but the US government wouldn't let certain live specimens out. Evidently daphnia could be used in terrorism. (Daphnia is a small microscopic arthropod common in ponds and lakes.) Part of the experiment is minimal interference, so we're also not feeding them.

Unlike the experiments, we are feeding the lab animals. I just added to our turtle (Nightcrawler, named after the Christian X-Man who is able to escape by teleportation, as it seems our turtle can do) and Boazowi, the goldfish (as in from Dar Bwazza, where the school is). We now have a small African bird, "Hard-headed" in Arabic (the students vote on names); and a frog I caught, which I named, Houdini, at the suggestion of another teacher, for his repeated ability to squeeze through the bars of the cage, but only when you're not looking. The bars are only 1/6th the width of his body. Praise God for lack of ribs. (Probably why there are many frogs capable of switching genders; no ribs to make females from...) As such, he's been put in a much smaller cage with a top on it, and no bars. But it's been cool recently to give him crickets that we're not using in our long-term experiment, and watch him/her watch the crickets, and suddenly, lunge before you can look, and no more cricket...